I sometimes pick up odd books from minor publishers I don't recognise. Tabloid Books was one such publisher. They described themselves as "New, exciting and different"...

These are fast-moving thrillers that tell the story of the events which lead up to, surround, and then follow the 'breaking' of an exclusive front page banner headline in a typical tabloid newspaper, the Daily World.

Tabloid Books were based at 12 Beresford Drive, Southport PR9 7JY, and appear to have only published three titles in 1992-93:

Brighton in winter doesn't seem to have much to offer Vanessa. No fun, and no one who really understood her. Until she met Dusty.__Attractive, gentle and confident--he's just about everything she could wish for. That, and a date for the Valentine's Ball. But Dusty seems to have other plans...

A Small Book of Grave Humour by Fritz Spiegl. Pan 02871, 1971.

"The object of an epitaph is to identify the resting place of the mortal remains of a dead person. It should therefore record only such information as is reasonably necessary for that person."—The Churchyard Handbook

Metal Mickey's Boogie Book by Metal Mickey and his friends, with help from Colin Bostock-Smith and Mary Danby; illustrated by Bryan Reading. Armada C1955, 1981.

All kinds of fun with TV's most lovable robot and his friends Brainbox, Bootface, Stringbean, Stumblebum, and, of course, the Little Fruitbat.

Monday, June 28, 2010

Alan Plater, playwright and screenwriter, died on Friday, 25 June, aged 75. He was best known for his TV work on such series as Z-Cars, Softly Softly and in more recent years Dalziel and Pascoe and Lewis but, to my mind, his finest moments were with The Beiderbecke Affair and its two sequels. There was almost no action at all - just marvelous, sparkling dialogue.

A small connection with British comics: he adapted Bill Tidy's Daily Mirror strip "The Fosdyke Saga" into two plays, The Fosdyke Saga (1975) and Fosdyke Two (1976) which successfully toured the country.

Plasmid by Robert Knight, based on a screenplay by Jo Gannon (London, Star 30683, 1980).

*Note: Jo Gannon credited on cover and spine.

There was a sudden swishing of leaves behind him and he twisted around, his face contorting in horror as his eyes alighted on the warped parody of a human being which was advancing on him. The creature was like a ghost, its ivory skin gleaming in the dark, a mud-stained white gown hanging raggedly on its body. It was shaped like a man but looked otherwise inhuman, its scarlet eyes glinting with an uncanny hunger and lust. Eric's heart gave a tremendous jolt and stopped beating. He slumped forward onto the ground, his dead eyes staring upwards but seeing nothing as the nightmare figure moved forward, panting, its arms dangling at its sides. It gazed down at the dead man for a moment, then regarded the dog. It knelt beside the dead animal, tore a leg off the carcass and bit into it, greedily, voraciously, like an animal devouring its prey...

What makes this an oddity is that it is a novelisation for a movie that was never made. It was to have been made by Salon Productions, who produced Adventures of a Taxi Driver and two sequels, which were hugely successful in the late 1970s. Stanley Long was to have directed the movie but it failed to get off the ground. Instead, Long's next project was the three-story horror anthology Screamtime (1983).

The screenplay—in which a scientific experiment to alter DNA in order to make man adaptable to the extreme environments of deserts, the arctics and even the vacuum of space, goes wrong—was credited to Jo Gannon, actually Joe Gannon, who was credited as Editor on Long's trio of Adventures movies. Irish-born Gannon, went to the USA at the age of 17 and was involved as a lighting technician at the Avalon Ballroom. Before long, he was involved with rock acts Pink Floyd and Alice Cooper, doing lighting for Cooper's 1975 Welcome to my Nightmare concert.

Gannon then appears to have returned to the UK in the late-1970s before departing again for America where he has written, directed and produced a number of American TV shows, including Archie Bunker's Place in the 1980s and In the Heat of the Night in the 1990s, with episodes of Moonlighting, The Twilight Zone and Max Headroom along the way. His most recent writing credit, according to IMDB, is an episode of Law and Order Criminal Intent in 2009.

The novelisation, credited to Robert Knight, was written by Christopher Evans, who also wrote a couple of other horror novels under pseudonyms, as well as co-editing anthologies (with Robert Holdstock), editing art books and publishing seven novels under his own name (Capella's Golden Eyes, The Insider, In Limbo, etc.).

Sunday, June 27, 2010

Ella Scrymsour has been something of a mystery to researchers for many years. A relatively minor author, her work nevertheless falls into a number of categories where people keenly seek out information: science fiction, horror and crime. As the bulk of her output was romances, often only a single work falls under the microscope, usually her novel A Perfect World. Researchers dig a little, find nothing, and move on.

Well, it seems that it's now my turn to dig a little. I figure that any book that John Clute considers "remarkable" is worth a look. So it is with The Perfect World that we start, and I'm grateful to Ned Brooks for allowing me to reprint a review of the book he wrote for It Goes On The Shelf (July 1995, online here):

I mention this book in connection with The Night Land because they are similar in several ways—both are from the same period, both are utterly humorless, and both make use of the idea of dehydrated water (Hodgson's is a powder that turns to water when the air hits it, while Ms Scrymsour's is a 1-inch cube of what looks like camphor that makes a quart of water when heated).__The lack of humor makes these books hard to plow through, though The Perfect World is written in conventional English prose and reads far more easily than the obsessively-detailed pseudo-archaic first person narrative of The Night Land. In a way this makes the technical howlers in Ms Scrymsour's book more startling—her prose is conventional, her very British characters are conventional, and yet, in spite of her bizarre imagination, she apparently had a very dim grasp of physical reality.__The story starts off as a supernatural thriller—our heroes come to a small village to learn the coal-mining business, as their uncle and guardian (who in his spare time is buiding an airship powered by a mixture of "petrol, radium, and theolin") owns the mine. They apparently set off a local curse (dating from Henry VIII's seizure of the monasteries) that forbids strangers in the village, but the link of this curse to subsequent events is never explained and is soon forgotten when one of them vanishes and the other is lost in a mine cave-in. As soon as the action moves underground, Ms Scrymsour's deficiencies in physics become noticeable—the hero lost in the cave-in finds himself by an underground stream and throws in a piece of coal to see how deep it is! "There was a slight splash, but no sound came to tell him that it had reached the bottom". He eventually comes upon humanoid creatures—"no more than three foot six inches", with purple skin, flaxen hair, and a ten-inch horn in the middle of the forehead. One of these attacks him—"he beat his horn in Alan's face". I find this impossible to visualize.__The horned purple midgets (the High Priestess has "small and pretty" features, "almost of English mould") turn out to be the descendants of ancient Hebrews swallowed up by the earth for defying Moses (see Numbers 16, v.31); and our heroes (the one who vanished is found by the one lost from the mine—he had been dragged down into the bowels of the earth by an incomprehensible sort of electric rope that the troglodytes have for that purpose), who have had proper classical educations at Queens College, Cambridge, soon learn to speak their corrupted Hebrew. Moses is dated to 1400 BC here, so the people of the underworld have had 3300 years to turn purple and grow horns.__After further underground adventures our heroes escape to the surface with one of the midgets, who turns to dust as soon as the sunlight strikes her. They find that five years have passed, they have missed WWI, and they are in Australia.__As with the Curse, the plot now abandons the purple midgets. One of our heroes takes his Australian nurse home as his wife, and they find that the uncle, in his grief at their disappearance, has become a hermit and perfected his 900-foot aluminium aircraft, the Argenta. They take it up for a spin and then the world is destroyed.__Fortunately, the Argenta is fitted with an optional outer hull that "unfolds and clips into position by means of strong clasps" at the pull of a lever. The space between the hulls is then filled with a "mixture of gases of which ether is the chief component". The ship with our heroes, wife, baby, uncle, and an engineer and a mechanic is hurled into outer space. After a year or so they reach Jupiter, almost dead of hunger and thirst. The mechanic goes out too soon and dies of the sulfurous gases of the upper atmosphere.__Oddly enough, the basic data on Jupiter is about right—it is five times as far from the Sun as the Earth and our heroes realize that this would give it only 1/25 the solar radiation. The pleasant climate is explained by a crude version of the greenhouse effect. The surface gravity of Jupiter is given as three times Earth normal, and that checks with my reference book as well.__Jupiter has a planet-wide advanced civilization of humans descended from an Adam and Eve who did not sin and so were never cast out of their garden. Sin, however, is not absent. After a battle with a devil-worshipper for the hand of the princess, our unmarried hero marries her and eventually becomes King of Jupiter and lives happily ever after.__It would make a great movie...

A brief series about psychic investigator Shiela Crerar appeared in Blue Magazine in 1920 was rediscovered by Jack Adrian and reprinted in 2006.

Nothing is known about Ella M. Scrymsour beyond the information appearing in Who's Who in Literature, which gives her year of birth as 1888, a brief list of books and magazines contributed to—Pearson's Weekly, Novel Magazine, Blue Magazine, Corner Magazine, Lady's Companion, Woman's Companion, etc.—and an address c/o Literary Year Books Press, Ltd., 21 Breeze Hill, Bootle, Lancs., who were the publishers of Who's Who in Literature.

Bizarrely, a small clue to her identity may appear in the Spanish ABC magazine published in Madrid on 22 November 1925, which translates as:

ABC in New York.
PRESENTATION OF "THE BRIDGE OF DISTANCES" IN THE INTERNATIONAL THEATRE

The International, founded and directed by Irma Kraft, finishes its inauguration shiningly. For the opening an interesting Chinese atmosphere work was chosen, written by two English. It is called, symbolically, The Bridge of Distances, and is by authors John and Ella Scrymsour.

So we now know that she had a husband called John. Checking for information on this play we find that The International Playhouse was founded by Irma Kraft in 1925 with the object of performing plays from around the world in New York. Kraft travelled around Europe before the first season began on 5 October 1925 buying plays and the 8 June 1925 issue of the New York Times announced that "Tsu Tsan or The Bridge of Distance" was to the International's first offering after an opening at the Morosco Theatre on 28 September). The cast, announced later, was led by Ullrich Haupt, Mary Newcomb, Beryl Mercer, Stephen Wright and Ray Collins.

The Bridge of Distances proved a little controversial as it featured a white woman having an affair with a Chinaman. Ned Brooks, again writing in It Goes On The Shelf (January 2000, online here), describes the novel thus: "This was published 2 years after her The Perfect World, mentioned in a previous issue. The first part of it is a standard racist pulp adventure involving two British rogues stealing a princess and a priceless jewel from a noble Chinese family in 1873—and the second part is theosophy about the karmic consequences of this adventure in 1923. Much better written than The Perfect World, but not as much fun!"

A big clue appears twice in the pages of the New York Times: the paper's "News and Gossip of The Rialto" column on 7 June 1925 notes that "Martin Lewis and Evan Thomas, of London, who aquired the world rights of an Anglo Chinese play by John and Ella Scrymgeour, have sold the American rights to the International Playhouse of New York." The paper's "Theatrical Notes" for 11 September 1925 also gives the authors' names as John and Ella Scrymgeour.

If I'm right, Ella M. Scrymsour is actually Mrs. John Scrymgeour and the best match I have been able to find in UK records is Edith M. Scrymgeour (nee Brett), possibly born Edith Mary A. Brett in Wayland, Norfolk, in 1870. Edith married John M. Scrymgeour in Newcastle upon Tyne in 1913. J. M. Scrymgeour was in the phone book living at 19 Moor Road South, Gosforth, Newcastle, in 1932-34; I believe he died at Castle Ward, Northumberland, in 1933, aged 57. He is therefore likely to be the John MacLaren Scrymgeour born in Ludlow, Shropshire, in 1876.

The phone book then lists Mrs. E. M. Scrymgeour at that address in 1935-48; she then moved to 44 Rectory Road, Gosforth, in 1949-50, then disappears from the phone book, which makes me wonder if she is the Edith M. Scrymgeour who died in Winchester, Hampshire, in 1950, aged 80.

This unfortunately contradicts one of the known facts about Ella... that she was born in 1888.

I may have taken a wrong-turning somewhere but I think there's a good chance that Ella M. Scrymsour was actually named Scrymgeour. A copy of her marriage or the death certificates of Edith or John might shed some light, should anyone care to take a punt.

UPDATE: 28 June 2010
Jamie Sturgeon suggests an alternative to my identification of Norfolk-born Edith Mary A. Brett which is a slightly better fit to the birth date. There was an Edith Mary Brett born in Durham, Gateshead, c. 1881 (which fits the age for the Edith M. Scrymgeour who died in 1950). She was a secretary to her father, a glass merchant and was living in Newcastle-upon-Tyne in 1911. John Maclaren Scrymgeour was a partner in a St. Lawrence, Newcastle, based Size making firm, the Gelata Products Company. One of the partners dropped out in December 1914 but the other two, Scrymgeour and Turner Crankshaw, continued the business. Scrymgeour held a patent in 1915 (renewed in 1923) for an invention entitled "Improvements in or relating to rosin size for paper making".

Again, I should note that Edith and John Scrymgeour may be a red herring and we have yet to find Ella and John Scrymsour.

With his third novel, Peter Van Greenaway proves himself to be unquestionably a master of suspense. Each of his plots turns out to have a more shattering impact than the previous one. The Man Who Held the Queen to Ransom and Sent Parliament Packing was hailed in the Press as the "most astounding novel" of its year. Of its successor, Judas!, R. C. Churchill said (in the Birmingham Post), "as thirlling a story of suspense as any reader could desire"; the Manchester Evening News called it "a cliff-hanger"; and The Times declared, "This extraordinary book (which contains about three other novels) is impossible to set aside." Now Mr Van Greenaway comes up with something even more startling.

The quiet opening, which suggests a detective story, is deceptive. A well known novelist, Morlar, has been battered almost to deatah; in fact, the police doctor pronounces him dead, but by some miracle of will-power, there's a flicker of life in him still, desperately holding on. Inspector Cherry of the Yard can find no conventional clues; but, an unconventional man, he begins to explore Morlar's mind, as revealed in his novels and in interviews with his psychiatrist, Zonfield.

Zonfield describes Morlar as "the most dangerous man in the world", and he could be right... throughout Morlar's life, his enemies have mysteriously met disaster. In their sessions together, the psychiatrist has tried to explain this (and much more) away as coincidence or premonition. But he cannot explain away the appalling evidences of his power which Morlar now produces—the destruction of a submarine, the crash of a jumbo jet into Centrepoint, the fatal deflection in orbit of a manned moon rocket.

And now, from a note in Morlar's journal, the Inspector realises where he intends to strike next, and why he is striving so desperately to stay alive to engineer his atrocious coup...

The novel builds up to a climax of agonising suspense, as the Inspector tries in vain to persuade people at the very top level that he isn't crazy and that the fantastic danger is real. And at the end Morlar, his coup achieved, passes on a last two-word message of even more terrible import. This is indeed the Arctic and Antarctic of chillers.

Peter Van Greenaway is a bit of a mystery. His novels are well known, especially The Medusa Touch, which was filmed in 1978 and starred Richard Burton and Lee Remick. What surprises me is that almost nothing is known about Van Greenaway himself.

Despite what it says in the blurb above, The Medusa Touch was not his third novel but his fifth, the first two (The Crucified City and The Evening Fool) appearing in the early 1960s. Van Greenaway was born in London in 1929 and died in 1988. He was a former lawyer who turned to writing full time... and that is all that appears to be known about him.

The real mystery is that he doesn't seem to appear in birth or death records. There is a brief announcement of his engagement on 12 October 1949 in The Times: "The engagement is announced, and the marriage will shortly take place quietly, between Peter, only son of Mr. and Mrs. A. G. Van Greenaway, of London, and Ursula, only daughter of the late Mr. Philip Mond, and of Mrs. Mond, of Flat 7, 71 Holland Park, London, W11."

The marriage records record the marriage in 4Q 1949 in Kensington between Ursula A. I. Mond and Peter V. Greenaway. Ursula was born in 1928.

It seems that Van Greenaway began writing for TV in the late 1950s, his scripts including one-off plays for ITV Television Playhouse, ITV Play of the Week, The Wednesday Thriller, Thirty-Minute Theatre, Mystery and Imagination and ITV Sunday Night Theatre. Working backwards, he appeared as an actor in a series called Escape in 1957 and had a play on the radio (Home Service) entitled The Drummer Boy as early as 1955.

However, this small (but usually well received) list of credits is all that remains of Van Greenaway beyond his engagement notice and a note that he and his wife attended the memorial service of Mrs. Constance Goetze in 1951.

If Van Greenaway was, indeed, his name. The name doesn't turn up in any census or phone records. Only two Peter Greenaways were born in 1929, one (Peter N., born in Uxbridge) the son of Horace and Beatrice Greenaway, the second (Peter, born in Maidstone) the son of William and Laura Greenaway... not A. G. Van Greenaway.

So who was Peter Van Greenaway? At this time I have no idea... a mystery that has me mystified. Unusual for such a high profile author.

Minor update: 26 February 2011
From an anonymous comment below and a little further digging, we learn that Peter Greenaway was the son of Arthur Thomas G. Greenaway (1902-1972) and his wife Florence M. (nee Hyde) who were married in West Ham in 1926; their son, Arthur L. Greenway, was born in 1927. If you recall that 'Peter' was the only son, I think this one can be classed as "solved" thanks to our anonymous contributors.

Thursday, June 24, 2010

A few more books that I'm reluctantly letting go as I try to clear some shelf space before we move house. All prices exclude postage & packing (1 book works out at around £3 for inland UK, although some may be heavier and a little more expensive).

I also have loads of early issues of Wizard and Hero Illustrated tucked away in a box that I've yet to get to. A bit of comics' history. If anyone's interested, drop me a line at the address top left (below the photo).

The Beano and The Dandy: Focus on the Fifties (D. C. Thomson, 2004). £5

Monday, June 21, 2010

The comic strips are back! We haven't run one for a while as most of my time in front of the computer has been dedicated to scanning book covers from books that I'm getting rid of, plus the occasional cover gallery, knocked together while I have all the books in one place. However, I'm dedicating Sunday evening to cleaning up pages from The Sign of Four, an adaptation of the second of Arthur Conan Doyle's four Sherlock Holmes' novels (it was a sequel to A Study in Scarlet and preceded The Valley of Fear and The Hound of the Baskervilles).

This adaptation appeared in Look and Learn between September and December 1968, drawn by Robert Forrest, who had earlier drawn an adaptation of The Hound of the Baskervilles. As I implied previously, Forrest is a bit of an acquired taste, one that it took me a little while to discover. It was only after I'd seen a lot more of his earlier work for the Thriller Picture Library, where he worked on Victorian classics like Dr Jekyl and Mr Hyde and The Picture of Dorien Gray, that I began to appreciate his style. The two Sherlock Holmes adaptations were amongst his last work and a fitting tribute to an artist who was at his best when depicting London's foggy, lamplit streets.

Make sure you come back tomorrow for the next episode, which introduces one of the villains of the piece, Thaddeus Sholto.

Sunday, June 20, 2010

Another radio comedian... and if you haven't guessed yet, I'm clearing out a shelf of these things, hence the recent galleries relating to Joyce Grenfell and Spike Milligan (scroll down to see them if you like this kind of thing).

Tony Hancock was one of the comedy greats. Hancock was dead by the time I was six, so I doubt if I caught his Hancock's Half Hour first time round, so I guess I learned about him through osmosis. I remember hearing an episode of the radio series (in which he became a Scottish laird) on a car journey (where to and when I've no idea) and the BBC probably repeated episodes of the TV series in the late 1960s but I can't pinpoint the moment when I realised that Hancock and his scriptwriters Ray Galton and Alan Simpson were the finest team British comedy has ever produced. There can't be a person alive who hasn't seen at least a clip of the infamous line from "The Blood Donor" ("A pint? Why that's very nearly an armful!").

Pressure of time means I'll have to point you in the direction of Wikipedia to learn more about Hancock. He died on 24 June 1968 but, forty-two years on, and with radio shows and the remaining TV shows still available on CD and DVD, hopefully he'll not be forgotten.

The Best of Hancock by Ray Galton & Alan Simpson (London, Robson, 1986)
Robson 0-860-51367-X, 1993. (contains: The Economy Drive; The Two Murderers; Twelve Angry Men; The Big Night; The Cold; The Missing Page; The Poison Pen Letters; The Radio Ham; The Lift; The Blood Donor)

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